Pester power: my 4 yo really wants Barbie, what to do?

[Greythorne]

i know it's not the most taxing question on the feminism board, but how would you handle this?

DD1 has never had Barbie, although various Polly Pockets and Strawberry Shortcake dolls have made their way into our house :)

I just feel so strongly that Barbie is a terrible representation of the female body, i.e. She's completely out of proportion, her hips are impossibly thin, her waist ridiculous etc. And that's before we start on the predominantly pink outfits, the emphasis on appearance etc.

I know children enjoy role playing via dolls and recognise the developmental need to play house, play parent, play at setting up a little imaginary world. And so I have steered DD1 towards.....Sylvanian Families, which, while heavy on gender clichés feature animals rather than fetishised female forms.

But of course all her friends have Barbie. And Barbie is everywhere.

Just one more instance to chalk up to be being "well-intentioned but (perceived by child as) evil mummy?

"her career is limited to fairy, mermaid, princess or nursery teacher"

A few years ago yes but not atm.

chef - different kinds
vet- lots of different ones
snowboarder
driver
computer technician
architect
teacher - different kinds
newsreader
skier
olympic gymnast
lifeguard
Paleontologist
nurse
police officer

there are still the more passive/frivolous ones too, babysitter, cheerleader, dancer, movie star etc. and they manage to prettify everything (police officer barbie has def modified her uniform ) but I personally wouldn't want them to make the 'serious' barbies significantly less appealing than the frivolous ones because I don't want my dd to think that interesting stuff is only for people who don't care what they look like. It just reinforces the pretty airhead or plain but bright stereotype.

Where can you get all these? Our local toyshop only has the fairy princessy mermaidy stuff.

There are approx. 70 barbies in my loft, DD went through a phase with them, she's got a dozen or so of the special ones like Mulan that I'm hoping will be worth a fortune in the future .
The majority of them are career type ones like vet, doctor, dentist etc. I'm talking 15 years ago so have no idea what current dolls are like.

I think that as long as children have a wide variety of toys to play with , it's fine, she also had hundreds of toy cars / model planes etc.

I do thoroughly dislike all this pink and fluffy princess shit that's appeared in the last few years, things were a lot more gender neutral when DD was small, I suppose that's marketing for you.

70?

That's enough to stage a military coup and take control of your house. I hope you haven't got any Action Men up there who might turn into arms dealers.

'I can be' ones have been really popular the last few years. Tesco and toys r us sell some of the chefs, teachers, vets and drs. Snowboarder and driver a pretty common too. Argos sells lots of them but in typical argos style you can't choose which one you get. Architect and computer technician are new. Ebay and Amazon sell the less common ones.

have they got sensible shoes?

ok, I wasn't allowed barbies as a child, and I'm pretty much the only woman I know who hasn't got body issues of some kind. Just saying.

Wow, there's a paleontologist barbie!

one of them has wellies. I can't remember which. Maybe there is a 'festival barbie'.

love the name FFS.

I would just get a Barbie. My DD has one Barbie and having not made a big issue of it, she doesn't particularly favour it over her other toys.

There are a couple of quite smug looking Kens up there .

I think the collection of Norwegian trolls DH brought back from Norway for her (or are they Trogs?) help with any body image issues

oh yes, I meant body IMAGE issues!

I bought a vet Barbie last year for 4-year-old DD but my feminist husband got the better of me and hid it on top of the cupboard. I'm watching this thread to see whether I can persuade him to relent...must say I'm still waiting to see a really rigorous condemnation.

Hateful poor quality junk. She'll be fed up of how fuzzy the hair goes and how easily the clothes rip, long before she's old enough to see the impossible figure thing.
Get her a build a bear in a pink frilly dress and sparkly shoes. She'll be able to dress that herself, hug it and take it to bed.
My 13 and 10 yearolds bears are still going strong, barbies went in the bin.

Saw these in Tesco yesterday. The appearance is still thin but more scope for a develop your own style not just saccharine philosophy.

www.amazon.co.uk/Monster-High-Cleo-De-Nile/dp/B0058NTKB4/ref=sr_1_6?s=kids&ie=UTF8&qid=1321627860&sr=1-6

I had a barbie and I loved it. It's just playing she doesnt know it represents anything. Its just a pretty dolly with pretty dresses.

My friend tried to keep her daughter from dolls, toy kitchens etc. First day of nursery makes a beeline for the baby dolls and carried it round all day.

No way am I getting barbie for DD. She is a terrible, terrible representation of an adult woman to children. I don't care that she now has a job or anything like that. Physically she is a ridiculous role model for children and at far too young an age she promotes physical perfection and what an adult "should" look like.

Your DD doesn't need Barbie for role play. There are other dolls out there for that. She will not miss out, she won't be that odd child who couldn't have barbie. It will not turn her into some unsocialised loon who can't make friends.

Really shocked that so many people in the fwr section don't seem to see a problem with barbie dolls.

Don't parents say no any more? There were loads of toys that I wanted and couldn't have when I was a kid. I don't even know why my parents refused to buy most of it (although the word "tat" did come into it quite often, iirc, as I was particularly drawn to shoddy plastic shit).

Hasn't harmed me.

A friend of mind when I was a kid said she wasn't allowed Barbie "because it is sexist"..

I had no idea what sexism was at the time, or that the inequality in male/female representation I was definately aware of was called 'sexism'..

I would see this as an opportunity to start teaching her about how cool girls actually are and that Barbie's impossible bodyshape and clothes would make it impossible for her to fulfil all the cool stuff girls can actually do..

i.e.- do not buy it - it is Beelzebub's mascot. I wish I had learned what sexism was earlier and that my mum had protected me from it more. Instead I found myself unenthusiastically playing with deformed plastic crap (because everyone else had it) and wondering what it was that I wasn't 'getting'.

read 'cinderella ate my daughter'

and then buy her a barbie.

but the most non-conformist one you can find. some of them are less 'eat me i'm delicious' than others.

she's at the point where conformity is really important developmentally - she can break out of that and become an individual when it is developmentally apporpriate and by using your provision of all sorts of other not quite so gendered and pinked options, and by the way you bring her up.

but desiring conformity at 4 with your peer group is entirely normal, and doesn't mean she's necessarily going to grow up with body issues or be a cheerleader.

if it helps, i had a sindy when i was younger, and we used to set up string death slides so that they could fly out of the upstairs bedroom windows to the garden. they don't have to be used to play 'where's ken, i look so purty, what shall i wear next?' we didn't buy ours barbies, but dh's grandmother bought dd1 her first one when she was 3 ffs.

dd1 is now 12 and very much an individual. i'm not even sure she owns a skirt or dress...

Phew, bit of balance in the thread now.

I think I will take the approach of not buying Barbie myself, not promoting them as suitable gifts from well-meaning relatives and simultaneously suggesting Sylvanian Families.

If we get a Barbie as a gift, I suppose I would not go so far as to bin it.....but I really can't see one good reason to accept Barbie in to our house other than DD really wants one. Well, Dd wants lots of things including chocolate three times a day and hair washing only once a year and she does not get those wishes fulfilled either.

Thx for the thoughtful responses.

all children want shoddy plastic shit. i gave each of mine $20 to spend at the sodding book fair yesterday. dd1 got two v sensible books, ds1 bought two anti-bullying plastic wrist bands and the most ridiculous plastic skeleton fist pointer (it was broken by the time he got home, incidentally) and dd2 bought a wimpy kid book and a phineas and ferb book.

dd2 is 8 btw and has an entire box of barbies and associated bolleaux. they rarely get played with, even to make zip lines... although i might encourage a skeleton bob track to be built when we have enough snow... i think we could get one from the lower deck dwon to the ground in a drift! anyway, barbie is unlikely to have a major impact on your dd's life if all other aspects of her upbringing are equal.

i don't like barbie, but she ain't all that. just another bit of plastic disposable. wouldn't be my first choice, and i've never paid money for one, but the marketing works so well that you can't avoid some contact.

I used to agonize over Barbie as well. I have 3 dds - one of them was a 'Barbie girl", the more pink and fluffy and sparkly the better, dolls were her passion (including Barbies) and all she wanted was to have babies when she grew up (which she declared would be 16!), another daughter would only wear trousers and only liked fluffy toys (all "male" personalities) and no dolls ever - the other one couldn't see the point of teddies or dolls, climbed high trees at 5 and regularly decapitated her sister's Barbies when she wanted to wind her up (it worked in a spectacular melt-down fashion too).

They all knew the meaning of the words "sexist crap" and "gender stereotype" well before their friends - but to be honest they were very different people with very different tastes and personalities, I could have no more forced the tree-climber to play with a Barbie than I could convince the Barbie lover she really just wanted teddy bears. I took the view that the best thing I could do was to make it clear (in an age appropriate way) what my views were on this kind of stuff. It has meant for interesting discussions where they have tried to convince me of the value of "America's top model" and offered to pay for me to have a makeover . Now that they are very opinionated young women the conversations are even more interesting as I can explain my feminism in much more depth - so my one piece of advice is no matter what you decide about 'allowing' Barbie-type dolls or not, she will be exposed to the images and ideas, so the most important thing you can do is to talk about why you don't like them and keep the conversation going!

I'm actually glad mine are all so different as it forced me to recognise that I had to have a relationship with who they were, not who I might want them to be ...
I have to admit though that I felt a real sense of relief when the Barbie & baby lover got to 18 not pregnant and the tree-climber got to 18 alive .